Fruityshop (水果店)

Time Out says

Details

Users say

Time Out says

Vinyl may be in the grip of a
worldwide resurgence, but you
wouldn’t know it living in China.
Though the last few years have
seen more and more record
stores popping up around Beijing,
vinyl remains a niche part of an
already niche market for physical
recordings. Heck, we’re living in the
age of the internet in a land where
piracy is rife – why wouldn’t people
ditch discs for MP3s?

Luckily for the nostalgic among
us, there’s a small-but-growing
contingent working to revive music
fans’ deep-seated collecting
instinct. Among them is Fruityshop,
a record store and venue in Dongsi
that specialises in secondhand
vinyl. ‘I’ve always loved vinyl – both
how it sounds and how it looks,’ says
co-owner Wang Zheng. ‘I appreciate
the quality and the fact that you
get to enjoy the full impact of the
cover design.’

Wang originally opened the store’s
first incarnation, Strange Fruit,
two years ago in Qianliang Hutong,
before moving it to its present digs
on Dongsi toutiao and renaming it
Fruityshop, after the label of his new
partner, Zhai Ruixin (also known
as the ambient musician me:mo).
With the new location – a spacious,
unmarked storefront tucked away
just north of Dongsi subway station
– came new possibilities.

‘The old
space was too small,’ says Wang.
‘Here we can have shows, and we’re
planning to eventually diversify
– clothes, motorcycle accessories,
stuff like that.’

Still, music remains Fruityshop’s
main focus, a fact that’s obvious as
soon as you step through its rusted
iron doors and take in its wall-to-
wall vinyl. The offerings start with
jazz, followed by aisles containing
four decades of pop and rock (’60s through to the ’90s), soundtracks,
blues, country, bluegrass,
ambient and experimental. Like
any secondhand store, Fruityshop
contains a mix of classics, gems
and dross, all priced accordingly
from around 40RMB to more
than 200RMB.

‘We buy most of our records from
the US and Japan,’ explains Wang.
‘Some you can pick, and some
distributors just send you a big box
full of records for a fat price, without telling you what’s inside. So it’s kind
of a gamble in terms of what you end
up with.’

That’s both the vexing and the
charming thing about Fruityshop;
you could spend an hour picking
through their crates without finding
anything you want. Then again,
if you’re looking to build a record
collection from scratch, you could do
worse than classics by Bob Dylan,
Count Basie, King Crimson and
The Kinks. But don’t expect much
in the way of modern music – while
the shop offers a decent selection
of relatively new ambient and
experimental, as well as several
’90s rock and new-age classics,
Fruityshop is a steadfastly retro
affair, with few to no releases from
the last two decades.

But then, that’s what fellow
record stores like Indie Music or C
Rock are for; Fruityshop is going for
something else. With its concrete
floors, warm lighting and musty
aroma, it feels like a record store
should, complete with a makeshift
cafe and rooftop for lounging,
along with weekly ambient shows.
Stop by for a browse or wait for
the next gig for a chance to be
transported back to your early years
of music nerd-dom.